New Books in Latin American Studies

Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality (Beacon Press, 2022) will challenge what you thought about racism and bias and demonstrate that it’s possible for a historically marginalized group to experience discrimination and also be discriminatory. Racism is deeply complex, and law professor and comparative race relations expert Tanya Katerí Hernández exposes “the Latino racial innocence cloak” that often veils Latino complicity in racism. As Latinos are the second-largest ethnic group in the US, this revelation is critical to dismantling systemic racism. Basing her work on interviews, discrimination case files, and civil rights law, Hernández reveals Latino anti-Black bias in the workplace, the housing market, schools, places of recreation, the criminal justice system, and Latino families.By focusing on racism perpetrated by communities outside those of White non-Latino people, Racial Innocence brings to light the many Afro-Latino and African American victims of anti-Blackness at the hands of other people of color. Through exploring the interwoven fabric of discrimination and examining the cause of these issues, we can begin to move toward a more egalitarian society.Anna E. Lindner is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. On Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

In A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being (Duke UP, 2021), Kaiama L. Glover champions unruly female protagonists who adamantly refuse the constraints of coercive communities. Reading novels by Marie Chauvet, Maryse Condé, René Depestre, Marlon James, and Jamaica Kincaid, Glover shows how these authors' women characters enact practices of freedom that privilege the self in ways unmediated and unrestricted by group affiliation. The women of these texts offend, disturb, and reorder the world around them. They challenge the primacy of the community over the individual and propose provocative forms of subjecthood. Highlighting the style and the stakes of these women's radical ethics of self-regard, Glover reframes Caribbean literary studies in ways that critique the moral principles, politicized perspectives, and established critical frameworks that so often govern contemporary reading practices. She asks readers and critics of postcolonial literature to question their own gendered expectations and to embrace less constrictive modes of theorization.Anna E. Lindner is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. On Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

On this episode, Martín Garrido Lepe y Beatriz Rodriguez-Satizabal talk with Clemente Penna winner of the Tamás Szmrecsányi Prize for thesis in economic history of the period 1810 to 1913 during the second edition of the Prize for the best PhD thesis in Latin American economic history, awarded by the Peruvian Association of Economic History, in the VII Latin American Congress of Economic History.By analysing newspaper, notary books, debt ligation, judicial attachments and bills of exchange registries, Clemente investigates the build up of a strong private non-banking credit market with complex relationships between “the business of slavery”, the property rights, and the access to capital.The Red de Historia Económica Iberoamericana (RHEI) is an organization that seeks to help in the dissemination of research by young researchers in Ibero-American Economic History. In this space broadcast by NBN Español, we conducted a series of interviews where recently graduated authors present their doctoral theses.Hosts: Beatriz Rodriguez-Satizabal, Universidad del Pacífico (Perú) and Martín Garrido Lepe, Universidad de Barcelona (España) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

The future of Honduras begins and ends on the white sand beaches of Tela Bay on the country's northeastern coast where Garifuna, a Black Indigenous people, have resided for over two hundred years. In The Ends of Paradise: Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras (Stanford UP, 2022), Christopher A. Loperena examines the Garifuna struggle for life and collective autonomy, and demonstrates how this struggle challenges concerted efforts by the state and multilateral institutions, such as the World Bank, to render both their lands and their culture into fungible tourism products. Using a combination of participant observation, courtroom ethnography, and archival research, Loperena reveals how purportedly inclusive tourism projects form part of a larger neoliberal, extractivist development regime, which remakes Black and Indigenous territories into frontiers of progress for the mestizo majority. The book offers a trenchant analysis of the ways Black dispossession and displacement are carried forth through the conferral of individual rights and freedoms, a prerequisite for resource exploitation under contemporary capitalism.By demanding to be accounted for on their terms, Garifuna anchor Blackness to Central America—a place where Black peoples are presumed to be nonnative inhabitants—and to collective land rights. Steeped in Loperena's long-term activist engagement with Garifuna land defenders, this book is a testament to their struggle and to the promise of "another world" in which Black and Indigenous peoples thrive.Christopher A. Loperena is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. You can find the article discussed during this conversation, published in American Anthropologist, here.Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University, focusing on urban anthropology, futurity, care, and migration. Her work has been featured in Current Anthropology, City & Society, JOTSA, Radical Housing Journal, and entanglements. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

In The Unexceptional Case of Haiti: Race and Class Privilege in Postcolonial Bourgeois Society (University Press of Mississippi, 2022), Philippe-Richard Marius recasts the world-historical significance of the Saint-Domingue Revolution to investigate the twinned significance of color/race and class in the reproduction of privilege and inequality in contemporary Haiti. Through his ethnography, class emerges as the principal site of social organization among Haitians, notwithstanding the country’s global prominence as a “Black Republic.” It is class, and not color or race, that primarily produces distinctive Haitian socioeconomic formations.When Marius arrived in Port-au-Prince to begin fieldwork for this monograph, to him and to legions of people worldwide, Haiti was axiomatically the first Black Republic. Descendants of Africans did in fact create the Haitian nation-state on January 1, 1804, as the outcome of a slave uprising that defeated white supremacy in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Haiti’s Founding Founders, as colonial natives, were nonetheless to varying degrees Latinized subjects of the Atlantic. They envisioned freedom differently than the African-born former slaves, who sought to replicate African nonstate societies. Haiti’s Founders indeed first defeated native Africans’ armies before they defeated the French. Not surprisingly, problematic vestiges of colonialism carried over to the independent nation. Marius interrogates Haitian Black nationalism without diminishing the colossal achievement of the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue in destroying slavery in the colony, then the Napoleonic army sent to restore it. Providing clarity on the uses of race, color, and nation in sociopolitical and economic organization in Haiti and other postcolonial bourgeois societies, Marius produces a provocative characterization of the Haitian nation-state that rejects the Black Republic paradigm.Philippe-Richard Marius is assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the College of Staten Island (CUNY). Marius has conducted extensive fieldwork in Haiti. He is writer, producer, and codirector of the film A City Called Heaven.Aleem Mahabir is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Contemporary popular culture is riddled with references to Mexican drug cartels, narcos, and drug trafficking. In the United States, documentary filmmakers, journalists, academics, and politicians have taken note of the increasing threats to our security coming from a subculture that appears to feed on murder and brutality while being fed by a romanticism about power and capital. Carlos Alberto Sánchez uses Mexican narco-culture as a point of departure for thinking about the nature and limits of violence, culture, and personhood. A Sense of Brutality. Philosophy after Narco-Culture (Amherst College Press, 2020) argues that violent cultural modalities, of which narco-culture is but one, call into question our understanding of "violence" as a concept. The reality of narco-violence suggests that "violence" itself is insufficient to capture it, that we need to redeploy and reconceptualize "brutality" as a concept that better captures this reality. Brutality is more than violence, other to cruelty, and distinct from horror and terror--all concepts that are normally used interchangeably with brutality, but which, as the analysis suggests, ought not to be. In narco-culture, the normalization of brutality into everyday life is a condition upon which the absolute erasure or derealization of people is made possibleThis book is available open access here.Host Pamela Fuentes historian and editor of New Books Network en español. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Dannelle Gutarra Cordero's expansive study incorporates writers, cultural figures and intellectuals from antiquity to the present day to analyze how discourses on emotion serve to create and maintain White supremacy and racism. Throughout history, scientific theories have played a vital role in the accumulation of power over colonized and racialized people. Scientific intellectual discourses on race, gender, and sexuality characterized Blackness as emotionally distinct in both deficiency and excess, a contrast with the emotional benevolence accorded to Whiteness. Ideas on racialized emotions have simultaneously driven the development of devastating body politics by enslaving structures of power. Bold and thought provoking, She Is Weeping: An Intellectual History of Racialized Slavery and Emotions in the Atlantic World (Cambridge UP, 2022) provides a new understanding of racialized emotions in the Atlantic World, and how these discourses proved instrumental to the rise of slavery and racial capitalism, racialized sexual violence, and the expansion of the carceral state. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Pedro Lebrón Ortis's book The Philosophy of Marronage (Filosofía del cimarronaje) theorizes the broader context behind the notion of "cimarronaje," marronage. Usually conceived of as enslaved peoples' flight from the plantation during colonial times, cimarronaje is an expansive term referring to the mentality of living beyond oppressive societal norms. Lebrón Ortiz synthesizes philosophical notions behind cimarronaje to argue that we can see evidence of cimarronaje that continue today. Other praise:"Comenzar por la experiencia de quienes no pueden librarse de nada –y mucho menos detener otra voluntad que no sea con los recursos de su propia fuerza– es partir de una experiencia totalmente distinta a la descrita habitualmente en los libros de filosofía política. Se trata de comenzar a pensar la libertad desde la perspectiva de quien experimenta el mundo como una molienda y del que no tiene más vínculos con el poder que una cita pautada con la muerte. Para el esclavizado, la libertad está en salir de esa condición impuesta que lo define todo. Es el camino a otro sitio. Una puerta que se abre cuando menos se espera."-Anayra O. Santory Jorge"La filosofía del cimarronaje que se elabora en este texto apunta a la necesidad de pensar la filosofía, no a la manera de admiración desinteresada con respecto a las simplicidades y misterios del mundo, sino como escándalo ante las violencias genocidas y las contradicciones profundas del mundo moderno/colonial."-Nelson Maldonado-TorresAnna E. Lindner is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. On Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Critics of globalisation come in many forms from environmentalists to trade unionists and many others in between. In the midst of all the controversy less attention has been paid to how big a phenomenon globalisation actually is and how it compares to another trend – regionalism. In this podcast Owen Bennett Jones discusses The Globalisation Myth: Why Regions Matter (Yale University Press, 2022) with its author, Shannon K. O Neil. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies

Ariana Huberman's Keeping the Mystery Alive: Jewish Mysticism in Latin American Cultural Production (Academic Studies Press, 2022) delves into creative renditions of key aspects of Jewish Mysticism in Latin American literature, film, and art from the perspective of literary and cultural studies. It introduces the work of Latin American authors and artists who have been inspired by Jewish Mysticism from the 1960s to the present focusing on representations of dybbuks (transmigratory souls), the presence of Eros as part of the experience of mystical prayer, reformulations of Zoharic fables, and the search for Tikkun Olam (cosmic repair), among other key topics of Jewish Mysticism. The purpose of this book is to open up these aspects of their work to a broad audience who may or may not be familiar with Jewish Mysticism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/latin-american-studies